Ivory Towers

There's some kind of internetty bitch-slap-fest thing going on between Jonah Goldberg and Juan Cole. Currently I am not in possession of the patience required to find out what exactly it's all about and to paraphrase it here. But I did take note of this exclusionary passage from Juan Cole's Informed Consent blog:

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Granting for a moment that all of those statements about Jonah's experience with all things Iraqi is true, what does Juan's ruleset say about your and my participation in the debate and continuing discussion about Iraq? All of Juan's caveats apply to me, and odds are they apply to you too; our opinions don't matter.

Looking at Cole's CV, he lays out there every skill and experience that he blasts Jonah for not having. That's not surprising of course. That's how Cole came up with the list. Notice how he doesn't complain that Goldberg isn't an Iraqi living in Iraq.

Not to diminish the value of such skills and experience, but in a discussion between academics and the lay public, or the lay punditry, if you will, it's rather counter-productive for the academic to use his CV to make his arguments. We should and must value the contributions and opinions of experts in any field, but where public opinion and public policy are concerned, we should be encouraging discussion of as wide a segment of the people as possible. For an expert to say I'm right and you're wrong because I'm an expert and your opinion doesn't count is not conducive to the open discussion required by democracy.

David Neiwert has something which he bombastically refers to as Orcinus Principium No. 1, which, while the target is conservatives, has as its aim keeping the American debate as wide and as open as possible:

In a democracy, we are best served by having an open and lively debate on the direction we take as a nation. This does not change in wartime. Indeed, in a war such as this one, where our democratic institutions are being directly challenged by right-wing religious fanatics, it is even more important to preserve the right to speak freely.

I don't believe that Juan Cole's credentialism serves that aim, though I rather strongly suspect that Neiwert would claim that it doesn't apply here.

Taking Cole's CV argument to its logical extreme we'd of course have this country run by that panel of learned scientists and other academics that you always see in science fiction movies of the 1950's. So empaneled, he could argue with his fellow experts about this detail or that of national policy and laugh a condescending laugh when one of the little people says something uneducated and stupid. Don't worry, we experts know what we're doing- go back to your public entertainments. We provided the holo-vision for you.

But public policy, what it means to be an American, what the US stands for, and what US goals are are not things we leave to experts alone. With input from experts, we debate them, raucously and continually. Being an expert does not give you the ability to exclude others. And to decide these matters we fight it out in the political realm, where being an expert doesn't get you any additonal votes.

Update: The left side of the blogosphere is really into this story. Commenting are The Mahablog, James Wolcott, Just a Bump in the Beltway, and Happy Puppy Furry Story Time. From the non-left we have Chrenkoff, Mansfield Fox, and justbarkingmad.com.

Update: Goldberg posts a lengthy response:

As I've conceded more than once now, he knows more about the Middle East. And, frankly, he seems like precisely the kind of boarding-school rector with a God complex who'd try to win by subjecting me to a withering quiz about how many Shiite clerics I can name or how the Aswan dam was funded.

This raises the central point he is trying bury: The fundamental issue I raised in my column was not about the extent of his knowledge but the quality of his judgment. And on that question I am hardly alone in thinking that Cole's judgment is often laughable....